The present invention relates generally to the transmission of channel state feedback in a mobile communication network and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for compressing channel state feedback in an adaptive manner.
The use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and/or the receiver in wireless communication systems has attracted substantial attention over the past decade because of the potential improvement in both coverage and data rate. Unlike single antenna systems, where channel state information does not significantly improve the capacity, substantial gain in capacity can be achieved in multiple antenna systems when accurate channel state information is available at the transmitter. In a frequency-division multiplexing (FDD) system, the receiver typically feeds back channel state information to the transmitter. While assuming perfect channel state information at the transmitter is unrealistic due to the capacity limitation on the feedback channel and its round-trip delay, it has been shown that even partial channel knowledge at the transmitter can provide significant gain in capacity compared to systems that do not take into account channel state information. However, feedback of detailed channel state information consumes valuable bandwidth on the reverse link. Consequently, there is significant interest in designing effective methods of reducing the amount of feedback of channel state information without significantly penalizing the capacity of the reverse link.
One approach to channel state feedback uses unstructured block or vector quantizers (VQs) to reduce feedback of channel state information. Although, in theory, unstructured VQs can attain the optimal achievable compression, the complexity of unstructured VQs grows exponentially with the dimension-rate product. For example, in a MIMO system with 4 transmit and 2 receive antennas, the dimension of the unstructured VQs being proposed in the literature can be as large as 4*2*2 (real and imaginary parts of each channel tap coefficient)=16. The storage and computational requirement of large dimension unstructured VQs can be prohibitively high in practice for quantization resolutions (or source coding rates) that achieve reasonable accuracy.
Apart from computational complexity, another problem with unstructured VQs is their inability to adapt to different channel statistics. Most proposed quantization techniques for compressing channel state feedback assume that the MIMO channel taps are independent and identically distributed (IID) across spatial dimensions. In practice, however, the statistical distribution of MIMO channels is often highly correlated spatially and across frequency. VQs designed based on the IID assumption may not provide the desired performance over the wide range of channel statistics typically found in wireless environments. On the other hand, designing an unstructured VQ to account for all possible distributions of the channel taps while maintaining reasonable quantization accuracy is not practical.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods of compressing channel state feedback that can be adapted for different distributions of the channel taps while maintaining reasonable accuracy and complexity.